Friday, April 08, 2011

During the 1970's, a sociopath by the name of Lenny Murphy spent his childhood bullying people and threatening people with knives, as well as likely doing the other activities favored by young sociopaths such as torturing and killing varous neighborhood pets and such. As usually happens with sociopaths of that such, he became a serial killer.

But it was Northern Ireland, and the Troubles, and Lenny Murphy joined a Protestant militia, the UDA. So, for a time, Lenny Murphy's ghastly murders were not only tolerated but condoned, as long as he and his gang of vicious cronies chose Catholics as his target for ghastly murders. The trail of dead bodies left in their wake earned them the moniker "The Shankhill Butchers." It was not until some years later, after Murphy expanded his list of dead bodies to include fellow protestants, that his fellows in the UDA leaked his movements to the IRA, which assassinated him in 1982. But the majority of the rest of his gang still walk the streets of Northern Ireland today, unpunished.

I consider this song by The Decemberists to be as much a warning to the rest of us as a warning to children, a warning that when things turn to violence, it is not ordinary people who come out on top -- it is violent sociopaths like Lenny Murphy who kill without hesitation and with not a qualm afterwards. Something for Libertopians to think about, methinks...

This is "The Shankhill Butchers", off of the Decemberists' album The Crane Wife.

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